Browsing: La Scena Online

La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etcEditor: Wah Keung ChanAssistant Editor: Andreanne VenneISSN: 1206-9973

Comparisons in music are unfair. An ephemeral art cannot be measured and pinned, like a butterfly, to the page without risking mortal damage. Nevertheless, human beings possess critical faculties and spend much of their lives assessing whether A is preferable to B. Not necessarily better, just more apt to present circumstances. I offer these caveats because I have been listening to Dvorak orchestral works from very different sources. Nathalie Stutzmann with the Atlanta Symphony present the American Suite, opus 98, together with the 9th symphony, From the New World. The project marks Stutzmann’s debut on record as a symphonic conductor…

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GUELPH AT THE CROSSROADS This year, the Guelph Jazz Festival organization is in transition, after its former director, Scott Thomson, was appointed artistic and general director of FIMAV (the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville) last year. The Guelph festival’s Interim Artistic Director Karen Ng and Interim General Manager Alex Ricci and their team have nevertheless assembled a promising lineup featuring a range of creative groups from Ontario, Quebec and the U.S. They’ve retained a strong focus on improvised music, in keeping with the Guelph Jazz Festival’s distinctive flavour, while also adding some world and electronic musics in the…

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“It almost happened by accident,” says Peter Burton (from Arts in the Margins) about the many organisations pulling their forces together for the upcoming Flux Festival, which will have its first edition from Oct. 4 to 10. In an era where money is rare for the creative arts, necessity is the mother of collaboration and no less than seven different organizations are involved in putting together concerts and conferences about experimental and improvised music during that week, including the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation as well as Innovations en concert. But while concert-goers will find much to enjoy…

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Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and,…

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One of the most unique features of the annual Bayreuth Festival dedicated to the operas of Richard Wagner is the opportunity it affords to revisit productions. Most big time European summer opera festivals pride themselves on presenting brand new stagings each year (though times may be changing given this year’s revival of Katie Mitchell’s 2016 production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Aix-en-Provence). But the idea of reviving and refining productions at Bayreuth is part of its DNA thanks to the Werkstatt (workshop) process initiated by Wieland Wagner in the 1950s. Stage directors are encouraged to hone their ideas as productions…

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The Glimmerglass Festival, among the top opera festivals in the world, has programmed an exhilarating 50th anniversary season that centers artists and creators, celebrates opera and musical theater legends, and introduces a thrilling world premiere opera based on a beloved book.  

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